"Festivus" was a holiday created by the writers of Seinfeld for a 1997 Christmas episode, which they jokingly made into an alternative to Christmas for those who hated the commercialization of the holidays.
One of the "traditions" created for the fake holiday was the "Airing of Grievances." In 2015, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul used that "tradition" as a springboard to write a report on government waste.
Prior to 2015, Paul would post a few comments on Twitter highlighting egregious examples of government waste. But on December 23 of that year, he released a 38-page report.
“Our investigations into federal spending may not have uncovered any government contributions to something called The Human Fund (Money for People),” read the report, another nod to the sitcom, “but we did find Uncle Sam putting taxpayer dollars to work creating a foreign made-for-TV cricket league, paying for federal yoga classes, developing a climate change video game, and studying whether being in space changes the effectiveness of golf clubs.”
In that first 2015 report, Paul found more than $1.2 trillion in wasted taxpayer funds. The 2025 edition features $1.6 trillion in waste catalogued in black and white.
The Festivus Report 2025 makes for alternately entertaining and frustrating reading. But, if you tally the costs of the schemes and scams, they seem to make up barely a wad of spit in the vast sewage sea of trillion-dollar-plus annual federal spending. What's a few billion dollars among grifting friends, right? But those expenses add up, year after year, especially since the federal government continues to spend vastly more money than it collects. That means each pointless (or dangerous) medical experiment or nonsensical flush of taxpayer money down the fiscal toilet increases debt and the price of borrowing.
"Our country is over $38.4 trillion in debt, and the Treasury Department reports that our interest payments hit $1.22 trillion for 2025, an all-time record," the report observes of the largest expense documented. "Interest is now the third largest 'expense' in the federal budget—outranked only by Social Security and Medicare."
"Entertaining" only if you're a masochist.
The U.S. Department of State gave $244,252 to Stand for Peace in Islamabad to produce a television cartoon series that teaches kids in Pakistan how to fight climate change.
[The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] gave $3.3 million to Northwestern University so they can hire 15 people, erect 'scientific neighborhoods,' install 'safe space ambassadors,' and form endless committees to 'dismantle systemic racism.'
The Biden Department of Transportation (DOT) received $7.5 billion from Congress to fund electric vehicle charger stations nationwide, but only 68 charging stations are up and running.
Not nearly as entertaining was Reason's J.D. Tuccille reporting on continued dangerous experiments at the same Wuhan lab where it is believed COVID-19 was created.
"Fauci and the NIH weren't the only ones who funded the Wuhan lab," notes the report. "The disgraced USAID gave EcoHealth Alliance $54 million to collect underground bat coronaviruses, transport them to labs like the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and soup them up in gain-of-function experiments with 'humanized' mice to make them more contagious and deadly to people…USAID continued forking over millions of tax dollars to the tainted group until mid-2024."
Incredibly, in 2021, "the Biden U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) funded a five-year, $1 million collaboration to soup up bird flu viruses between the Wuhan Institute of Virology's (WIV) Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-controlled parent organization and a researcher affiliated with WIV."
WTF is wrong with these people?
What's truly frightening is that they don't care if their efforts to build the perfect bat virus are discovered. They know that no one will be arrested or punished. They know they are beyond the law because even if Congress knows about their insanity, few will want to do anything about it.
The Trump administration stopped this insanity, but the people who created the infrastructure to continue these "experiments" are still around, waiting for a Democratic president to give them more money to continue their work.
The new year promises to be one of the most pivotal in recent history. Midterm elections will determine whether we continue to move forward or slide back into lawfare, impeachments, and the toleration of fraud.
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